Teleport Interdiction

"Not where you thought that portal was programmed for, was it?"

— Sean "Dark Smoke Puncher" McNinja, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Teleportation is a tactical and strategic game-changer in any setting. Defensive methods become necessary. This trope covers that eventuality.

There are a number of ways to limit the power of Teleportation magic/technology to prevent excessive advantage:

• Conceal the port. For those systems that are limited to working in specific places or with specific equipment, this is an excellent first line of defense.
• Prevent the technology or magic from working in a given space. Usually involves jamming the signal or plot rock impenetrable by the teleportation mechanism. For inherent teleportation abilities, this overlaps with Power Nullifier.
• Allow it to work, but alter the destination. Bonus points if the redirected travellers are put in danger at their unintended destination.
• Allow it to work, but one-way only, e.g., incoming only or outgoing only.
• Allow it to work but prevent people from leaving the immediate vicinity once they arrive. Put the port behind a barrier, or set the port itself to prevent unauthorized users from leaving it.
• Allow it to work, but have a switch which temporarily disables it, either both incoming and outgoing or just one of them.
• Allow it to work but make it traceable. Teleporting leaves telltale signs that the opponent can easily follow, so at best it becomes a one-shot speed advantage.
• Exploit the Tele-Frag phenomenon. People who've just materialized inside a solid object aren't generally in any position to be a threat to anyone else.
• Set up a group of people armed and shooting to kill to guard the teleport's destination, so that anybody who uses it is met with a swift death.

Compare No Warping Zone, which is for Faster-Than-Light Travel. Teleportation with Drawbacks is the opposite way of restricting the power, by affecting the power itself, instead of defending against it.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion, the Gingko Trees' Stand, Les Feuilles, works by creating a pathway with the Ginkgo leaves as a medium, and from there anyone can send things to or away at near-light speeds as long as the leaves' paths intersect.
• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: After it becomes apparent to Azad that his plans have gone south, he tries to teleport away, only for Tohru to reveal that she saturated the surrounding area with her mana (making it impossible for anyone but her to use teleportation magic until it dissipates).
• My Hero Academia: The Nomu Johnny's Warping Quirk teleports people rather than opening a portal.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • In H'el on Earth, when the Justice League storms the Fortress of Solitude, Cyborg tries to save time by teleporting the League to H'el with a Boom Tube. However, H'el toys with them by redirecting their Boom Tubes, forcing the League to break in the hard way.
  • Adam Strange uses this technique to get rid of Aaron Bodine in Starman (DC Comics), tricking him into attempting to use his Zeta Beam teleporter when Opal City is sealed under a shadow shield. The machine attempts to do its job, sending Bodine to splat against the shield.
• Marvel Universe: Organizations like S.H.I.E.L.D. are shown to have entire departments dedicated to detecting and interfering with teleportation. The problem is there are countless methods being discovered, so there is endless effort to block each specific one. Secret Empire introduced a planetary shield that was impenetrable and saturated the world with "grey particles" that blocked teleportation of any kind.

Fan Works

• A Diplomatic Visit: Chapter 7 of the second sequel, Diplomacy Through Schooling, reveals that the mines where Neighsay are held act as this due to being lined with Cold Iron, preventing him from actually leaving via the use of his teleportation amulet.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: The dwarfs have, through runes, the ability to stop teleportation in and out of sealed spaces.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, Darkseid disrupts the warp gate transporting Supergirl back to the world of the living, making her land right in front of her (very bloodthirsty) enemy Satan Girl.
• Oversatuated World: Oversaturation: "Running": The Everfree Forest isn't a good idea to try and teleport into, for anyone other than chaos magic master Discord:
  Author's Notes: Plus, teleporting into the Everfree still isn't the best of ideas for anyone other than Discord.
• The Palaververse: Wedding March: An area can have "warding against teleportation" applied to it, to prevent leaving it that way.
• Quizzical: In Thweet Geniuth: "Disaster!", Quizzical's protection spell has this effect on Twilight teleporting from inside it:
  Twilight: Quiz, drop your protection spell, it's interfering with my teleport.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the Klingon penal colony Rura Penthe has a magnetic shield which prevents beaming. This is their only measure against escape, as the field is large enough that any attempt to walk around it is a probable death sentence.
  • In Star Trek: Insurrection, the crew sets up "transport inhibitors" which, well, inhibit transport. The Son'a shoot those, but the planet also has ore which naturally interferes with transports. That one is beaten by isolinear tags which allow the transporters to obtain a lock through the interference.

Literature

• In Battlefield Earth, Terl teleports back into his planet, where he thinks his gold awaits. However, his gold has been teleported elsewhere, and he dies because his planet has become a giant fireball.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Touma Kamijou's Imagine Breaker means that he cannot be teleported at all. Othinus gets around this because she actually changes the surroundings instead of moving Touma. Also, when Awaki Musujime tries to kill Kuroko by teleporting a massive object on top on her, Touma punches the object while it is materializing, causing it to return to its starting position.
  • According to the author, Accelerator can negate attempts to teleport him against his will or Tele-Frag objects into him. Teleportation still requires a vector of movement (albeit in more than three dimensions), so Accelerator can reflect it just like he can reflect other attacks.
• Deryni: Transfer Portals can be set as traps; a person could arrive at the destination but be unable to leave the physical space once there, either physically or by using his/her powers to return, unless released by another Deryni outside it. Portals can also be set so that only certain people can detect and use them; before Evaine and her family abandoned their manor house at Sheele, the Portal in the master bedroom was set so that only blood relatives could find and use it.
• Dragaera has sorcerous teleporation blocks, which can be configured to either only keep people from teleporting in, or to prevent teleportation both ways. The blocks are always placed over battlefields, to prevent teleportation from being used in war.
• In The Eight Doctors, an envious Time Lord is given a Timescoop by his superiors so he can get rid of the Doctor as a deniable agent. He tries to send several powerful monsters, but Five and Eight stop the attempts. When he tries again, the Doctors have rigged a counter to return the last monster - not to its point of origin, but to sender, with predictable consequences for the mook.
• In Fate/Apocrypha, Mordred and Kairi Sisigou get separated during their fight with Semiramis. Kairi tries to use a Command Spell to make Mordred teleport back to him, but Semiramis explains her magic can prevent it from working.
• Harry Potter has three main kinds of teleportation, each of which has limitations:
  • The Floo Network is like a railway and takes you from station to station (fireplaces), but the Ministry of Magic knows where you are going and can limit its use.
  • Apparition allows you to go virtually anywhere (Hogwarts building and grounds being a notable exception, although how easy it is to protect an area like this is never explained) but it's dangerous: you might leave body parts at your starting point. And there are charms that can prevent wizards from Disapparating as well. House elves have their own version of this which wizards seemingly cannot block (or perhaps never cared to).
  • Portkeys are objects, frequently ones that appear to have been discarded so that people not in the know will be unlikely to touch them (and get teleported by mistake). Disguise of this kind is also a security measure, though as is seen in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, other kinds of deception can be achieved this way. (Harry has never learnt how to cast the Portkey charm.)
  • There are some other, more rarely used types, which tend to bypass restrictions: in the fifth book, Dumbledore uses his phoenix to teleport out of Hogwarts, because he can't Apparate from there. Vanishing Cabinets seem to have a somewhat dangerous Floo-like network, which is used in the sixth book by Death Eaters, to infiltrate Hogwarts.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar novel Winds of Change, the spirit of Herald Vanyel hijacks Firesong's Cool Gate, bringing his party to the Forest of Sorrows instead of their intended destination. Vanyel is apologetic, but since he's a ghost who can't leave the Forest, this is the only way he has of getting in touch with them.
• In Hurog, Oreg, who is a weird mixture of Friendly Ghost and Genius Loci, but has a solid body, can teleport everywhere inside castle Hurog, and can also do this outside the castle, but only up to a certain distance. He can also teleport to the owner of the ring he's bound to, but that's it.
• In A Lord from Planet Earth, the Earth defense puts up a hyperspace barrier which ejects any object in hyperspace back to a normal space. Right into the sights of the Earth space fleet to blast the enemies away.
• The Merchant Princes Series:
  • The Merchants' War has a smart antagonist going up against dimension-hopping teleporters. Their particular brand of teleportation has safeties built in so that, if there's an obstacle at the other end, the teleport simply doesn't work. So, he fills his castle with netting and rope to foil his foes, which not only traps the teleporters into going exactly where he lets them, but lets his own troops walk around unhindered to boot.
  • More generally, everyone makes sure that important buildings are doppelgangered, or built on in both dimensions. The only exceptions are Modern Earth buildings that are several stories high, since there's no way to build something like that in the Gruinmarkt and nobody can get that high anyway.
• In the short story "Not a Prison Make" by Joseph P. Martino, the natives of an alien planet have the ability to teleport at will, which they use to make guerrilla attacks against invading Earth troops. The Earthmen try to make it more difficult for the aliens to infiltrate their base by filling empty areas with solid matter so the aliens can't appear there.
• Overlord (2012): Nazerick is normally covered in defensive wards which prevent any form of teleportation, except by wearers of the Ring of Ainz Ooal Gown (who are paranoid enough to remove it before going outside). On a smaller scale, Ainz also knows a spell called Delay Teleportation which he uses in battle as a trap for teleporting opponents.
• In The Stars My Destination, where Jaunting is the most common psychic talent, anti-teleport security measures include turning headquarters and homes into elaborate manipulable mazes. Anyone trying to jaunt in risks embedding their foot in an uneven floor or their entire body in a wall that wasn't there the day before.
• In Super Powereds, some teleporters can also act as anchors, effectively preventing teleportation into and out of the immediate area. Several anchors can work in a team to secure a larger area. Dean Blaine is a Power Nullifier, which means that teleporting to an area next to him isn't possible, unless he consciously shuts his nullification field off or reduces its area of effect.
• The thirteenth The Wheel of Time book presents the dreamspike artifact, which blocks the creation of Gateways within a large radius of its position, including ones inbound from outside the area of effect. In the Dream World, it visibly manifests as a spherical, semipermeable barrier of similar effect, except that teleportation is still possible between two points both inside the barrier.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has a variation on this in season 2: Fitz builds a device that prevents Gordon from teleporting out of a room (though he can still teleport within that room).
• Doctor Who: In general, Teleportation devices are called "transmats". They're not as widely used as in Star Trek, but blocking them has come up before.
  • In "Genesis of the Daleks", the Doctor and companions are taken to Skaro (homeworld of the Daleks) by this means. Another Time Lord reminds the Doctor (when he complains of the risk) that this is a simple thing for them, and they learned how to do it when the universe was less than half its present size.
  • Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen loves to teleport. The Ninth Doctor had already demonstrated that he can reverse a teleport. In "Boom Town", he does so several times as she repeatedly fails to run away and ends up closer every time.
• The Flash (2014): Shawna Baez (a.k.a. Peek-a-Boo) can teleport, but only to a place she can see. When apprehending her, Barry knocks out all the lights in a tunnel (at night), thus preventing Shawna from escaping. She is then put into a cell in the Pipeline which has a one-way mirror, so she can't see outside the cell and thus can't teleport.
• Sanctuary (2007): All Sanctuaries are protected by interference generators that turn any teleporting Abnormal attempting to enter one of them into disparate molecules. Originally designed to stop John Druitt, they become more useful when the Cabal starts creating teleporting soldiers of their own.
• Smallville: Alicia Baker can teleport, but she can't use her power if she is touching or surrounded by lead, so she can be imprisoned in a lead-lined room or depowered by being made to wear a lead bracelet.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • The "iris" is a metal cover that prevents unwanted visitors from entering Stargate Command on Earth. Stargate Command personnel and their allies are given a GDO ("garage door opener") which transmits an IDC (Gateworld wiki says this is an "iris deactivation code"), and only with a valid and received IDC will Stargate Command open the iris and allow people on the other side of the gate to reach Earth. The big keyboard near gates, the DHD ("dial home device") is merely the object which activates a gate and has nothing to do with the iris (though on Atlantis, the DHD panel in the control room has a button to raise the iris-like force shield). In case that doesn't work, there are machine guns and a heavy steel door between the Stargate and the rest of the base. The Asgard develop a version of their own which uses an almost-invisible force-field. SG-1 often tells less technologically advanced peoples to just bury their gate to avoid unwanted visitors. In the Backstory, the ancient Egyptians covered the gate with a big rock, and then buried it. The Tollan intangibility technology can go through the iris, so eventually the Goa'uld attempt to blackmail them into using it to bomb Earth.
    • One episode focused upon the Avenger, a virus that, when uploaded into a Stargate, used the gates' correlative update feature to spread across the entire network and disable correlative updates, causing all Stargates in the galaxy to lose track of each other and stop functioning until the virus was purged.
    • One episode has a planet belonging to Anubis (dead and gone by this point) protected by a "call forwarding device". Any incoming gate traffic with organic matter is held in the gate's buffer awaiting a positive recognition code. If the code is not received the gate auto-dials another planet and dumps its buffer there.
  • Stargate Atlantis:
    • The crew of the Daedalus, in their first appearance, plans on destroying a bunch of Wraith ships by using Asgard beaming technology to beam nukes onto them. It works the first three times they try it. After that, the Wraith figure out how to jam the beam. It's implied that they have managed to adapt so quickly because they have already had to do this when fighting the Vanir (rogue Asgard in the Pegasus Galaxy). The beams used by the Tau'ri are of Asgard origin. In a SG-1 crossover episode, they are able to teleport a nuke onboard a Hive-ship again when in the vicinity of a black hole, which disrupts the jamming signal (but, apparently, not the teleport). The explosion of the Hive-ship provides enough power for a Pegasus gate to connect to a Supergate in the Milky Way, the "kawoosh" of which takes out an Ori Mothership. Two (very large) birds with one nuke.
    • The show also features the mother of all interdiction methods: the Attero Device. Once activated, it disrupts the hyperspace frequency used by Wraith ships (and only Wraith ships), causing them to violently explode the moment they try to cross the event horizon. What's more, its effective range happens to span across the entire galaxy. Problem is, the subspace interference produced by the Device also causes all active Stargates within said effective range to overload and cook off in a multi-megaton detonation visible from orbit. Suffice to say, more than a few inhabited planets found this out the hard way...
• Since the transporters are such an integral part of the Star Trek franchise, it has a lot of this.
  • In general, it's not possible to transport through a ship's Deflector Shields. This is usually used as a way to add drama (with the ship having to drop its shields briefly in the middle of battle in order to beam back an away team), but it also means transporter-enabled boarding parties aren't a major part of battle tactics. And, of course, every other Negative Space Wedgie will prevent the transporter from being used.
  • Two prisons shown in Star Trek: The Original Series, the Tantalus penal colony ("Dagger of the Mind") and the Elba II asylum ("Whom Gods Destroy"), have security force fields which must be deactivated to allow beaming up or down.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Attached", the Enterprise's transporter beam is redirected by hostile faction on one planet, so Picard and Crusher end up in a prison cell on a different continent from where they intended to materialize.
  • The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Darkness and the Light" features the "remat detonator", which disrupts a person's pattern during transporter rematerialization, with gruesome results.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • The ability to use the transporter to beam down to (or to beam up from) Vashti is extremely limited. Picard has to receive clearance from Central Station before he can teleport to the planet, which is protected by an impenetrable shield. The transporter signal can only pass through the Deadly Force Field when there's an open spot in the network, which occurs every 30 minutes, and the gap only lasts for a minute each time.
    • Bjayzl's casino has a shield which prevents the La Sirena crew from beaming in or out from orbit. Seven of Nine is given a transport enhancer that allows them to bypass the shield once they get her inside.
    • Coppelius Station has transport inhibitors that prevent beaming, so Rios, Raffi, Narek, and Elnor have to find another way to sneak in the modified drone which contains Narek's molecular solvent grenades into the colony.

Tabletop Games

• Big Eyes, Small Mouth. A force field could be designed to block teleportation through it by reducing its defensive strength by 15 points.
• Champions has an Advantage for Force Fields (Barriers in 6E) that allows them to block teleportation.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Older editions had spells that affected teleportation into an area.
  • Forbiddance, teleport block, wall with no doors and zone of respite prevent teleportation altogether.
  • Dragon magazine:
    • The fiendish spell teleport ward can better block intruders with high magic resistance.
    • Translocation shift redirects incoming teleporters to a different location.
    • In the issue #205 article "Arcane Lore", the spell inner sanctum seals off an area from magical entry, such as teleport or dimension door spells.
  • Dimensional anchor (from Player's Option: Spells & Magic) prevents the affected being from being moved by any forms of teleporting and planeshifting.
  • Anticipate teleportation (D&D 3.5 Complete Arcane), while not blocking it, delays teleporters' arrival to allow ambushing them.
  • Forgotten Realms (AD&D 2nd Edition era) adds proof from teleportation.
  • The 2nd Edition Drow of the Underdark supplement mentions that the Underdark, where live the dark elves and their evil neighbors, is a highly magical place that makes teleportation unreliable.
  • Dungeon magazine:
    • In the issue #25 adventure "A Rose for Talakara", the evil wizard Talakara uses wishes from a Ring of Wishes to prevent anyone else from entering her castle by means of teleport or dimension door spells.
    • In the issue #41 adventure "Deadly Treasure", after the wizard Zathis creates his tomb, he uses a wish spell to prevent the spells teleport, word of recall or dimension door from working inside the tomb. This means that no-one can use any these spells to enter the tomb from the outside.
    • In the issue #60 adventure "Nemesis", the final battle against the marilith Kaliva takes place in the Shrine of Shaktari. The Shrine is protected by powerful magic that prevents entry by any kind of magical teleportation, such as teleport and dimension door spells.
    • Issue #61 has two adventures with this feature. In "Wildspawn", the monsters known as syllix secrete a thick gelatinous slime that turns into solid pink crystal after twelve hours. When it does, it is impossible to pass through the crystal using spells such as Teleport and Dimension Door. In "Dreadful Vestiges", the area around Holk House is protected by magical wards that prevent any kind of extradimensional movement spells, such as Teleport, Dimension Door, Phase Door and Blink.
• In the RPG Hot Chicks, the Ward of Shielding spell prevents magical, psionic and technological teleportation from being used to travel into or out of the protected area.
• In Pathfinder, neothelids can pull the tracking variation of this. They have an ability called Trace Teleport that grants them the mental coordinates of any teleportation spell used nearby them. They're also potent spellcasters who can cast teleportation at will, allowing them to pursue fleeing opponents or spies.
• In the classic Traveller Adventure 7 Broadsword, a unit of Zhodani Commandos tries to teleport aboard the title ship in order to capture it. The crew must prevent this by filling unoccupied parts of the ship with solid material so the Zhodani can't use them as a teleport location.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Teleport jammers don't stop you teleporting in so to speak, but rather stops you from reappearing in the material world, which is very bad considering that teleportation involves going through hell.
  • Other forms of denial involve simply jamming homing beacons, but that doesn't stop teleportation; it just means you show up about twenty meters away from your destination, including twenty meters straight up or straight down.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate:
  • In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, the siege of Saradush is complemented by a magic field that blocks teleportation out of the city. Certain special means bypass this, including the Player Character's ability to shift to another plane. But even the player's party is limited by this, because they can only shift back to the Material Plane inside Saradush or at a considerable distance from it; the time it takes for them to approach it from the outside becomes a plot point.
  • One of the bonus dungeons in Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast draws in and traps anyone teleporting near it. Naturally, it's populated by several angry mages who want to relieve the player of his macguffin that allows for escape.
• The Binding of Isaac: Tar Boys can only pop up in spots with oil on the ground. However, they can make oil with their shots and often spawn in rooms with Gushes that can makes lots of oil for them.
• The waypoint system in CrossCode allows you to teleport to specific destinations from anywhere in the world unless you are in combat. However, things get fucked up around the time of the climax episode:
  • During a scheduled raid with the group, Lea's teleportation is hijacked by the Blue Avatar, leaving her alone with him and her friends to continue on without her.
  • Once Lea is imprisoned in the Vermillion Wasteland, she can only teleport to locations in that area; all traffic out has been disabled.
  • After the episode ends, you are not allowed to teleport back to the Vermillion Wasteland, and may not return to that location until the endgame.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Dagoth Ur uses teleport jamming to stop you from teleporting away from his hall. Azura will then prevent you from teleporting away until after you've spoken to her. She'll do it again in the Tribunal expansion, after you've defeated Almalexia and attempt to teleport out of the Clockwork City, although in that case it is of the "alter the destination" type instead of a simple block.
• Fate/stay night: Gilgamesh's chain, Enkidu, is an "anti-divine" weapon which grows harder to escape in proportion to the target's divinity. When he uses it to bind the demigod Berserker in the Unlimited Blade Works route, it's so effective that it even prevents Illya from using a Command Spell to teleport Berserker to her location.
• The supershields in FTL: Faster Than Light prevent anyone from teleporting into any ship shielded by them until they are depleted, unless they have an augment available only in advanced edition. Attempting to teleport bombs onto such ships results only the shields taking the hit. The same shields also prevent mind control and hacking.
• Homeworld:
  • Gravity Well Generators prevent hyperspace gates from opening in their area of effect — and, worse, keep any opening gate from closing and the ships passing through in stasis, essentially turning them into sitting ducks.
  • Homeworld 2's Hyperspace Inhibitors do allow jumps into their area of effect... but hostile ships have to force their way through the gravity field, taking damage in the process. Furthermore, once they've arrived there's no leaving for them until they clear inhibitor range, which is positively massive for vessels such as the Shipyard. Finally, unlike the Gravity Generator (which burns out and detonates after prolonged use) inhibitors are passive-effect modules that can be built onto any module-compatible vessel.
• In the Borealis campaign of Iron Marines, the Raad use portals that materalize and send in more troops to harass you after a short while. Thankfully, they can be targeted and destroyed before they spawn any Raad. Hyper-portals on the other hand are nearly indestructible, are used by Nexus in his Boss Battle, and you need to send a Tortugon into the portal to destroy them while Nexus is temporarily defeated.
• Normally in La-Mulana, you can use the Holy Grail to teleport to any previously-read "Grail tablet" except in the middle of a boss battle, with consistent rules. However:
  • You can only normally teleport to front-side areas, unless you have a specific ROM equipped (or combination of two games in the non-remake version) that allows teleporting to back-side areas. Conspiciously, the Endless Corridor is officially a back-side area, but you can teleport to it without the necessary ROM. This is because Tiamat is using her Reality Warper powers to hide the area she resides in, the Dimensional Corridor, which requires the ROM in order to teleport to despite being a front-side area.
  • While you're inside the Dimensional Corridor, your Grail won't work at all; you can only leave the area through a specific exit. Once Tiamat is defeated, however, you can teleport from within the Dimensional Corridor again. The issue of the two Corridors' Grail arrival rules still persists, however.
• La-Mulana 2 has a few continuations of this rule, but there is no area-switching shenanigans this time.
  • While teleporting into the Eternal Prison is of no consequence, entering via a physical doorway will jam your Holy Grail, preventing you from teleporting out. There are doors that will kick you out of the area, however, and you will get your Grail unjammed if you leave this way, but your exit destination is unknown. Should you make it to Hel without the Holy Grail (and a bunch of other items), the jamming effect will no longer occur when you enter the Eternal Prison.
  • The Hall of Malice is just like a normal area in the game until you activate it using the Cog of Antiquity, whereupon the combined powers of Echidna's children will jam the Grail, much like the Dimensional Corridor. Once Echidna's Ankh is materialized, however, the jamming effect expires.
• League of Legends: The champion Camille has the ability to completely lock a champion down with her ult, Hextech Ultimatum. One trapped, an enemy team member cannot exit. This includes any form of teleportation, including Twisted Fate's, Tahm Kench's, Ryze's,and Urgot's. If one of them tries, then their ultimate will only take them to the outer limit of Camille's.
• In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, your party is often trapped in areas where the Escape spell is blocked.
• The Myst series plays with this heavily. Books are tools for teleporting — touching the linking panel in a linking book will transport you to the target world or "Age". Several of the games feature the landing points being contained in order to trap or quarantine new arrivals. Sometimes characters have been trapped by destroying all linking book leading out of an Age. In one extremely clever exploitation an ancient master of the Art created an Age that a person would link to, then link out to a corridor, and link back in to find that each trip would bring them to the same Age, but much older, moving forward in time each trip, eventually returning to the "present". It turns out the master had created an enormous rotating system of four contained spheres, each holding a version of the "Age". While the visitor is traveling down the corridor, the next, older looking sphere is rotated into place over the spot where they would arrive, creating a convincing illusion of time travel.
• NetHack has a good number of levels where neither the player nor most monsters are allowed to teleport.
• In the Portal series, portals can only be created on certain types of surfaces (e.g., white tile, yes; bare metal, no). In the first game, navigating through areas with few or no portalable surfaces becomes an increasingly common puzzle element in the later stages. The second game introduces a gel that can be applied to surfaces to make them portalable. It also helps that said white gel (and it's implied the tiles too) are made from a substance not readily obtainable, which becomes a plot point later. They're made from moon dust.
• Quest for Glory IV downplays this trope; it is possible to forcibly teleport people from outside Mordavia to inside (which is how the Hero ends up there), but the Dark One's presence in Mordavia messes up the teleportation (which is why the Hero ends up inside the Dark One instead of the summoner's ritual chamber).
• RuneScape has all sorts of ways to block teleportation.
  • The most obvious one is the "Teleblock" spell, which, when cast on another player, temporarily prevents them from teleporting.
  • There're also some areas, notably the Wilderness, where teleportation is either limited or completely disabled.
  • This is how Sigmund met his gruesome end. After teleporting to escape several times with a ring of life over the Cave Goblin quest series, Zanik, under the influence of Bandos, cuts his hand off then stab him to death, leaving only his hand to teleport to safety.
• Team Fortress 2: Teleportation is done one-way-only with machines placed at point A and point B. They can be sabotaged by either placing a Spy sapper on either machine (disabling both instantly and eventually destroying them) or directly attacking the teleporter. Users also leave behind a trail of energy in the first few seconds after teleporting, allowing enemies to discern its location.

Web Animation

• At the beginning of "Super-Showdown-Bowl!", Dr. Manhattan establishes that the arena is surrounded by a forcefield preventing even the heroes and villains gifted with teleportation powers to escape. The field is generated by the Oscar being himself, leaving them no choice but to fight.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: In "The End: Part 2", Dark Smoke Puncher hacks a portal that Dracula is using to escape, depositing him in the middle of a desert. On a sunny day. "Bleh" indeed.
• Bob and George: Dr. Wily apparently uses this to prevent Megaman from simply teleporting inside his lair before fighting the Robot Masters.
• In El Goonish Shive, the magical barriers that Adrian Raven puts up in the school to defend against Abraham fails to serve its intended purpose, but it does seem to function as this to Nanase's frustration.
• Grrl Power: Halo's indigo orb can create a personal forcefield that also prevents teleporters like Harem from going through (in either direction).
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Xykon creates a teleportation barrier with the epic spell cloister around Azure City after he captures it. Vaarsuvius manages to warp themself through it with assistance from the soul of a dead epic wizard, but ordinary casters must teleport to several miles away from the barrier and then walk in.
  • Teleportation is unrestrained within Xykon's cloister effect, but not in or out of Redcloak's dimensionally locked study, as Tsukiko discovers too late.
  • Vaarsuvius has also used the dimensional anchor spell a few times to lock down a teleporting character. It's even a minor plot point in the strip "Pop Goes Pop", where the villains can escape an ambush only because V is not with the heroes to lock them down.
  • In the Dwarven council chamber in Firmament, past the orange barrier any planar travel coming from the outside is blocked. (Not initiated from the inside, though, which makes plane shift still an offensive option.)
• Schlock Mercenary has Teraport Area Denial technology which prevents all teraports into, out of or within a given volume of space. These systems can "paint" an exception, allowing authorized people (or ships or whatever) to teraport in or out without lowering all the defenses. They can even create an entire pocket within the interdiction zone that can be used as a locus for in- or out-bound travel. Since the comic is military sci-fi, teraport interdiction usually is a huge plot point as whoever isn't interdicted can move around troops, ships and live ammunition at their leisure. There are also teraport cages, which can be installed within interdiction zones and allow for teraportation within them, but they burn themselves out quickly in the process and are thus mostly used to move squads around for rapid ambushes. Finally, TAD technology can be simply brute forced through, but the energy requirements for it are so utterly ridiculous that only the Fleetmind (who finds, in the head intelligence Petey's words, "Petawatts are chump change") has been able to do so consistently. And even so, it's done sparingly because that energy's got better uses elsewhere, and when scaled up to planet-size almost lead to breaking the core generator they have, i.e., they almost broke the galaxy by making its core stop spinning from energy expenditure.

Web Videos

• In ElectricalBeast's Let's Play of Super Mario 64, Mario loses a life whenever he performs a "telepor'".
• Spoofed in To Boldly Flee, in which just putting The Spoony One inside a cardboard box prevents any teleportation.

Western Animation

• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends:
    • In "The Return of Tambelon", Grogar captures all the unicorns in Dream Valley by somehow affecting Ponyland's magic to change all their teleport destinations to the dungeons of Tambelon, wherein the unicorns can no longer teleport.
    • Other episodes introduce other limitations villains can exploit to trap unicorns, such as not being able to teleport through solid objects, sometimes not even through nets despite My Little Pony: The Movie (1986) portraying the ability as turning into wisps of energy and the aforementioned warps to Tambelon.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • "The Crystal Empire – Part 2": One of King Sombra's traps protecting the Crystal Heart prevents a unicorn from escaping it by teleportation. They can still teleport, but any attempt to leave the confines of the crystal barrier teleports them right back in.
    • "To Where and Back Again": The Anti-Magic field surrounding the Changeling Hive also prevents going in or out through teleportation. Discord tries to warp directly to Fluttershy at the end of the first episode, but to his confusion the would-be rescuers just end up at the edge of the field and not in the hive.
    • "The Beginning of the End – Part 2": Twilight doesn't even try teleporting out of the crystal cage that Sombra erected around her and her friends, implicitly because she recognizes it as the same kind of barrier that blocked her power in "The Crystal Empire – Part 2". Instead, they all have to dig their way out.
    • "Sparkle's Seven": Starswirl the Bearded enchants the exterior of Canterlot Castle with fragments from Queen Chrysalis's Anti-Magic throne (from "To Where and Back Again" above), preventing any creature from using magic to penetrate the throne room.
• Rick and Morty: In "Rick and Morty's Thanksploitation Spectacular", when the military surrounds the Smith house, they cover it with an "anti-portal shimmer" meant to keep Rick from using his portal gun. It also apparently screws with the oven timer, ruining the cooking of the Thanksgiving turkey.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In "No Princess Left Behind", when Glimmer is captured by the Horde, Shadow Weaver traps her in a forcefield that painfully shocks her whenever she tries to teleport out of it. However, when Shadow Weaver starts to erase Adora's memories, Glimmer finds the strength to teleport out of it anyway to save Adora. This leaves lingering effects that handicap her magical abilities for the next few episodes until Shadow Weaver teachers her how to push past it
• Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends: In an episode guest-starring the X-Men, the villain traps Nightcrawler in a force field that he can't teleport out of.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: This happens several times throughout the series.
  • Tulgana IV is protected by an ion field that restricts communication and transporters. In "Envoys", this forces Ensign Boimler and Ensign Mariner to trek through the districts on foot to find K'orin rather than using the automatic recall on the shuttle.
  • "Grounded": A swarm of migrating verugament is interfering with transporters from Earth's surface to space.
  • "The Least Dangerous Game": The heavily ionized atmosphere of Dulaine prevents beaming, so travel is facilitated by space elevators (orbital lifts) that rise above the interference.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses", the Tramorfidian crystal blocks the use of dimensional scissors on school grounds. Star eventually blows it up to facilitate their escape.
• Wolverine and the X-Men (2009): Nightcrawler is captured on Genosha and kept in darkness in an opaque sphere because he needs to see where he's teleporting or risk ending up in a wall.

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